Don’t have a laptop? Try the virtual computer!

K. Ansar and P.P. Ismail, final year computer science students at an engineering college in Kerala India, have set up www.bloxtr.com, the prototype of a virtual computer in which you can store all your important documents, favorite music, colorful pictures and even videos.

The idea is that no one needs to carry a laptop or pen drive around. You can upload any files to the website and access it from any corner of the world. What you need is just an interface to access the internet.

But, is the idea implemented earlier?? I mean in the form of eyeOS. From the site I get:

“eyeOS is an Open Source Platform designed to hold a wide variety of Web Applications over it. eyeOS was thought as a new definition of Operating System, where everything inside it can be accessed from everywhere in a Network. All you need to do is to login into your eyeOS server with a normal Internet Browser, and access your personal desktop, with your applications, documents, music, movies… just like you left it last time.”

With the base system you can find a full suite of applications bundled, some for private use, like the file manager, a word processor, a music player, calendar, and notepad or contacts manager. There are also some groupware applications, such as a group manager, a file sharing application, a group board and many more.

Or is it like the GMail drive??

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Mail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium. (Google has nothing to do with this !)

GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google Gmail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your Gmail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag’n’drop files to.

Ever since Google started to offer users a Gmail e-mail account, which includes storage space of 4000 megabytes, you have had plenty of storage space but not a lot to fill it up with. With GMail Drive you can easily copy files to your Google Mail account and retrieve them again.

When you create a new file using GMail Drive, it generates an e-mail and posts it to your account. The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. GMail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the Gmail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures. But basically GMail Drive acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer.

You can copy files to and from the GMail Drive folder simply by using drag’n’drop like you’re used to with the normal Explorer folders.

Whatever it is I think it is novel idea, if implemented well. They are trying to convert this into a mobile application when 3G services become operational in India. The guys (Ismail and Ansar), along with three other classmates, have already won a project from a local software company on behalf of a Gulf-based airline to develop a system to make flight schedule information available on mobile phones. I wish them all best for their projects and of course bloxtr.